Days of Blood & Starlight(6)

“I wanted to.”

“I know.”

Akiva shook his head; he almost could have smiled, if it weren’t for everything else. “You know all, do you?”

“I know you.” Hazael wasn’t smiling, either. “And I know something has happened again. This time, though, you’ll tell us.”

“No more secrets.” This came from Liraz, who still stood at a distance, grave and fierce.

“We didn’t expect you back,” said Hazael. “The last time we saw you, you were… committed.”

If he was vague, Liraz was blunt. “Where’s the girl?” she asked.

Akiva hadn’t said it out loud yet. Telling them would make it real, and the word caught in his throat, but he forced it out. “Dead,” he said. “She’s dead.”





5


A STRANGE MOON WORD


From: Zuzana <[email protected]>

Subject: Hellooooo

To: Karou <[email protected]>



HELLO. Hello hello hello hello hello hello.

Hello?

Damn, now I’ve gone and done it. I’ve made hello go all abstract and weird. It looks like an alien rune now, something an astronaut would find engraved on a moon rock and go, A strange moon word! I must bring this back to Earth as a gift for my deaf son! And which would then—of course—hatch flying space piranhas and wipe out humanity in less than three days, SOMEHOW sparing the astronaut just so he could be in the final shot, weeping on his knees in the ruins of civilization and crying out to the heavens, It was just helloooooooo!

Oh. Huh. It’s totally back to normal now. No more alien doom. Astronaut, I just kept you from destroying Earth.

YOU’RE WELCOME.

Lesson: Do not bring presents back from strange places. (Forget that. Do.)

Also: Write back to signify your continuing aliveness or I will give you the hurts.

Zuze





6


THE VESSEL


There was one place besides Loramendi, Akiva told Hazael and Liraz, that he had thought Karou might go. He hadn’t really expected to find her there; he had convinced himself by then that she had fled back through the portal to her life—art and friends and cafes with coffin tables—and left this devastated world behind. Well, he had almost convinced himself, but something pulled him north.

“I think I would always find you,” he had told her just days ago, minutes before they snapped the wishbone. “No matter how you were hidden.”

But he hadn’t meant…

Not like this.

In the Adelphas Mountains, the ice-rimed peaks that had for centuries served as bastion between the Empire and the free holdings, lay the Kirin caves.

It was there that the child Madrigal had lived, and there that she had returned one long-ago afternoon in shafts of diamond light to find that her tribe had been slaughtered and stolen by angels while she was out at play. The sheaf of elemental skins she’d gripped in her small fist had fallen at the threshold and been swept inside by the wind. They would have been turned by time from silk to paper, translucent to blue, and then finally to dust, but other elemental skins littered the floors when Akiva entered. No flash and flitter of the creatures themselves, though, or of any other living thing.

He had been to the caves once before, and although it had been years and his recollections were dominated by grief, they seemed to him unchanged. A network of sculpted rooms and paths extending deep into the rock, all smooth and curving, they were half nature, half art, with clever channels carved throughout that acted as wind flutes, filling even the deepest chambers with ethereal music. Lonely relics of the Kirin remained: woven rugs, cloaks on hooks, chairs still lying where they’d scattered in the chaos of the tribe’s last moments.

On a table, in plain sight, he found the vessel.

It was lantern-like, of dark hammered silver, and he knew what it was. He’d seen enough of them in the war: chimaera soldiers carried them on long, curved staffs. Madrigal had been holding one when he first set eyes on her on the battlefield at Bullfinch, though he hadn’t understood then what it was, or what she was doing with it.

Or that it was the enemy’s great secret and the key to their undoing.

It was a thurible—a vessel for the capture of souls of the dead, to preserve them for resurrection—and it didn’t look to have been on the table for long. There was dust under it but none on it. Someone had placed it there recently; who, Akiva couldn’t guess, nor why.

Its existence was a mystery in every aspect but one.

Affixed to it with a twist of silver wire was a small square of paper on which was written a word. It was a chimaera word, and under the circumstances the cruelest taunt Akiva could fathom, because it meant hope, and it was the end of his, since it was also a name.

It was Karou.





7


PLEASE NO


From: Zuzana <[email protected]>

Subject: Please no

To: Karou <[email protected]>



Oh Jesus. You’re dead, aren’t you?





8


THE END OF AFTERMATH


And this was Akiva’s new hell: to have everything change and nothing change.